Nuclear Doesn’t Need More Black Eyes

At the bottom of it, it doesn’t matter that the amount of radioactive material lost in this particular instance is small.

Nor that it’s not enough to fashion a bomb.

Nor that it could be coated with candy and eaten by unicorns, who would then poop more exciting rainbows.

The fact that it was treated carelessly and then stolen and remains unaccounted for is a black eye on nuclear anything, period.

To sum up from the story:

Two security experts from the Department of Energy’s Idaho National Laboratory drove to San Antonio, Texas, in March 2017 with a sensitive mission: to retrieve dangerous nuclear materials from a nonprofit research lab there.

Their task was to ensure that the radioactive materials did not fall into the wrong hands on the way back to Idaho, where the government maintains a stockpile of nuclear explosive materials for the military and others.

To ensure they got the right items, the specialists from Idaho brought radiation detectors and small samples of dangerous materials to calibrate them: specifically, a plastic-covered disk of plutonium, a material that can be used to fuel nuclear weapons, and another of cesium, a highly radioactive isotope that could potentially be used in a so-called “dirty” radioactive bomb.

But when they stopped at a Marriott hotel just off Highway 410, in a high-crime neighborhood filled with temp agencies and ranch homes, they left those sensors on the back seat of their rented Ford Expedition. When they awoke the next morning, the window had been smashed and the special valises holding these sensors and nuclear materials had vanished.

Idiot instances like this will be another nail in the coffin of bringing any waste from Washington state or California to Idaho for treatment – even if doing so makes sense financially, as treatment facilities and crews that know how to work them already exist in Idaho. If the Department of Energy can’t keep track of a few samples of the bad stuff, who is to say the can handle transporting thousands of gallons of the stuff.

Particularly when the mishandling of such material by lab contractors appears to go unpunished.

And I know there are wagonloads of differences between the loss of this material and the safety precautions and checks and double checks and triple checks that would have to take place for any waste to come to Idaho for treatment. What matters is the perception, on a one-to-one ratio, for regulators and alarmists and Joe Six-Pack and Betty Housecoat to scuttle any deal that has the word “nuclear” in it.

Without a drop of waste coming – and still without knowing where the missing radioactive material has ended up – jobs are at stake and could likely be lost. Not those of the folks who lost the stuff, but those who could keep working safety and economically to treat waste from outside the state.

So what’s gotta happen?

Accountability. The Department of Energy, per this article, is pretty good at keeping non-Department folks in line with fines for losing or mishandling this bad stuff. Seems like the same rules ought to apply, and publicly.

Horse Sense. Nobody but nobody – even the noob writing this – should leave ANYTHING resembling a suitcase in a locked car overnight in a hotel parking lot. This is elementary security, folks.

NOTE: I’m saying this as a private citizen, and am not in any way speaking for the company I work for. I do work in the nuclear industry, but on the waste cleanup side.

Flobar to the Rescue

NOTE: This bit of useless writing was inspired by a lament on a friend's Facebook thread to turn a discussion over the actual function of hair conditioner into a poorly-written action novel, using the post comments as dialogue. We all know I can do poorly-written.

Per and Angelique dove down the concrete stairs into the subway. "A little further! A little further! Then we'll be safe from the fallout!" Angelique screamed.

"It's lucky the dating service matched me with a nuclear physicist, on this day of days," Per said, his massive pectoral muscles heaving underneath his business suit.

They rounded a corner and Angelique screeched to a halt. "Oh, you don't know how lucky we are, Per. Quick! Into that salon!"

Per obliged. "Finally, in my element," he said. Angelique began grabbing bottles of shampoo. "It's not as good as Flobar, but it could save our lives! Detergent is perfect for washing away every radioactive particle that may fall out of the air and stick to our skin oils!"

"Forget the conditioner!" Per yelled. "Following a nuclear blast, hair conditioner could make it easy for tiny radioactive particles in the air to stick inside microscopic crevices that cover the surface of each strand of hair between scales of hair protein!"

"But you'll lose your fluff," Angelique said, running her fingers through his long luxurious Swedish hair. "I LURVE your fluff."

"We'll all have to make sacrifices," he said, and drew her close.

"WAIT! That sushi bar!" She yelled. "If we eat all the seaweed in the sushi bar, we'll ingest enough iodine to protect us from the radioactive iodine in the air!"

"I love you," Per said. And for a brief moment, as the atomic wind howled at the end of the staircase they would not ascend until after the apocalypse, they found peace.

"I still think we should take some conditioner, " she said. "Because fluff."

"We can use almost anything for conditioner," Per said. "It's easy enough to test even. Alkaline opens the hairshaft, acid closes it. The best conditioners are acidic. You can even use vinegar as conditioner."

"That settles it," she said. "When this is over and we're back in a world where civil defense symposiums are again the norm, I'll recommend hair stylists be included on emergency planning committees." She flung aside a wad of seaweed and ran her fingers through Per's hair. "I will so miss the fluff," she whispered into his ear.

"I don't condition," he whispered back. "Opening the hair shaft dries out and damages your hair."

Some Typos DO Matter

A few weeks ago, in a fit of despair, I wrote a blog post decrying grammar Nazis everywhere. Maybe typos don’t matter, I said.

Maybe some typos, however, do matter.

Consider this (emphasis mine):

But LANL has never publicly acknowledged the reason why it switched from clay-based litter to the organic variety believed to be the fuel that fed the intense heat. In internal emails, nuclear waste specialists pondered several theories about the reason for the change in kitty litters before settling on an almost comically simplistic conclusion that has never been publicly discussed: A typographical error in a revision to a LANL policy manual for repackaging waste led to a wholesale shift from clay litter to the wheat-based variety.

The revision, approved by LANL, took effect Aug. 1, 2012, mere days after the governor’s celebratory visit to Los Alamos, and explicitly directed waste packagers at the lab to “ENSURE an organic absorbent (kitty litter) is added to the waste” when packaging drums of nitrate salt.

“Does it seem strange that the procedure was revised to specifically require organic kitty litter to process nitrate salt drums?” Freeman, Nuclear Waste Partnership’s chief nuclear engineer at WIPP, asked a colleague in a May 28 email.

Freeman went on to echo some of the possible reasons for the change bandied about in earlier emails, such as the off-putting dust or perfumed scents characteristic of clay litter. But his colleague, Mark Pearcy, a member of the team that reviews waste to ensure it is acceptable to be stored at WIPP, offered a surprising explanation.

“General consensus is that the ‘organic’ designation was a typo that wasn’t caught,” he wrote, implying that the directions should have called for inorganic litter.

Officials at LANL declined to comment about whether a typographical error led to the switch to organic kitty litter.

Then again, which is worse: The error, or those who follow the error unquestioningly?

Because it seems easy to me to pass this off as an error – the fault of some minor functionary who fat-fingered something that subsequently got missed by people who should have known better. And I say this not because I’m a minor functionary functionarying in a capacity similar to the procedure-writer who is probably sweating bullets as this story unfolds.

In nuclear space, we’re trained to have questioning attitudes. If something doesn’t look right – even after the procedure is revised – we’re supposed to question it, even at the risk of stopping work. And it’s clear in reading the rest of the New Mexican article about this incident, the culture of questioning at Los Alamos National Laboratory is what’s broken, typographical error or not. The root cause isn’t the error – it’s what happened with the procedure after it was published.

The typo is part of the classic “Swiss cheese” model of system failure. All systems have weaknesses in them – so the goal is to pass change through multiple systems in the hope that if an error passes through the weakness in one layer, it’s caught by a strength in another layer. Errors are only catastrophic if they pass through the weaknesses of successive layers.

So I approach this area with a lot of humility – not smugness since this is an example of someone else in the cagal. It could happen where I work, and it’s not fun to think about it. Reading about this episode encourages me to sharpen my saw, to make sure I’m not the weakness in my portion of the process here.

And I have an example today where keeping atop the review process of a document helped us avoid an error – it would likely not have caused catastrophe, but certainly could have resulted in a delay and a necessary revision of a procedure. Thankfully, one of my reviewers caught an error that we were able to fix before the procedure went into use. That’s a sign of things working.

A Nuclear WHAAAT? in Boise

My guess: Someone’s been reading The Radioactive Boy Scout.

To sum up: The EPA and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission cleaned up an apartment in Boise this week where they discovered a tenant fooling around with radioactive material. From the article:

NRC said the tenant had in his possession a variety of radioactive materials that included suspected uranium, uranium salts and equipment associated with handling radioactive materials. Radiation levels in the apartment were low – reported to range from 0.5 millirem, the level in an airplane, to 1.5 millirem, the level outside of the Three Mile Island reactor after its 1979 accident.

[EPA on-scene coordinator Greg] Weigel said the two apartment occupants were, for unknown reasons, trying to separate radioactive material from store-bought good such as smoke detectors.

I will confess I’d like to get my hands on some of that radioactive Fiestaware, but that’s about my outer limit on radioactive curiosity in the home. I see enough of the real nasty stuff out at work to want to do any mixing and grinding of radioactive goodies at my own house. Though it would be fun to have a Geiger counter . . . for curiosity’s sake, of course. Not because I want to open up a lab or anything.

This story is not hitting the national news, which is odd. Given the furore over ebola and ISIS-inspired terrorism, you’d think the fact that persons unknown were found to be messing with radioactive elements on the sly would be big news. I’d like to think the absence of this story’s spread is due to the relatively minor threat the radiation in this situation poses, but I’m sure there are other news dynamics involved.

Accident Inspires Incorrect Headline, Incorrect Juxtaposition

An explosion that killed one worker and injured three or four others at a French nuclear waste treatment site is inspiring headline writers all over the mass media to write incorrect headlines that blow the accident out of proportion.

The stories do generally a better job of explaining what occurred at the Centraco site Monday, but the fuzzy use of the pejorative “nuke plant” in the headlines is misleading readers and likely fueling fears of another Fukushima-style disaster, rather than what has actually happened.

The Associated Press headline (shown here at TIME.com, but Google searches show the “nuke plant” shorthand is being used legion elsewhere, so my assumption is the headline comes from the AP) screams “1 Dead, 4 Hurt in Blast at French Nuke Plant.” Where a photo accompanies the story, more often than not it’s of your typical nuclear power plant’s cooling towers.

I understand what’s going on here – it’s all due to shorthand. “Nuke plant” is shorter than “waste facility” or even “waste plant,” and conjures up a more concrete image – who cares if there’s an explosion at a French landfill, for instance. Throwing in the cooling tower photo makes the nuclear connection even more clear. Unfortunately, this kind of shorthand, as easy as it is in conjuring up pictures in the minds of readers, is inaccurate. Only by reading the story do readers understand – and then, only in a klunky fashion – what has occurred. And in this age of Twitter and instant praise/condemnation based on as few words (and facts) as possible, saying an explosion and death occurred at a “nuke plant” is going to get more attention and more negative reactions toward nuclear power, even though the accident did not, as a point of fact, occur at a nuclear power plant. (That it occurred in the mere vicinity of a nuclear power plant (experimental ones at that) is even more exciting to the fearmongers.)

Reuters – which in general does a lot better at technical and science reporting than the AP – does a better job with its headline, “Blast at French nuclear site kills one, no leaks” shown here.

CNN.com, too, does a fair job at reporting the facts without exaggeration.

It’s fair to include nuclear in both headlines, of course. But the image of a “plant” versus a “site” in many minds conjures up power plants, which in turn conjures up images of Fukushima and Chernobyl and Three Mile Island and C. Montgomery Burns buying another $1,000 ivory-handled backscratcher.

Why is this such a big deal to me? Well, I work at an American site that is processing nuclear waste. If an explosion occurred here and the news were saying it was at a “nuke plant” there’s be a lot of howling at the press in my work neighborhood. It appears the explosion occurred in an oven being used to melt metallic low-level waste, which is less dangerous than the stuff being processed where I work. (Per World Nuclear News and the American Nuclear Society, the furnace that exploded was being used to melt scrap metal, pumps, tools, etc., lightly contaminated with short-lived and low-level radioactivity) So again, the headline – and the images being used with this story in some places -- do not fit with reality.

Areva Snags $2 Billion in Loan Guarantees for Eagle Rock

This is a big deal for the nuclear renaissance in the United States, and even a bigger deal for Idaho – The U.S. Department of Energy today announced a $2 billion loan guarantee to help Areva, Inc., build its uranium enrichment plant at Idaho Falls.

In today’s announcement, U.S. Secretary of Energy Steven Chu said:

Increasing uranium enrichment in the United States is critical to the nation’s energy and national security. Existing reactors will need additional sources of enriched uranium soon. New nuclear plants that could start to come on line as early as 2016 will also need a steady, reliable source of uranium enrichment services. Areva’s project will help to meet that demand.

More information on Areva’s Eagle Rock Enrichment Facility can be found here.

This announcement, coupled with proposals in the American Power Act, could help Idaho and the Idaho National Laboratory further cements a role in the future of nuclear power in the United States, which is significant not only because of eastern Idaho’s nuclear heritage, but because of the expertise and facilities that exist here in handling and processing nuclear waste.

The award of the loan guarantees is conditional on Areva getting a combined construction and operating license from the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission. That license is expected to be granted next year.

Areva, to use Dan Yurman’s word, is “ecstatic.” From his blog, a quote from Areva:

“Areva is elated by this decision which will enable us to continue development of our Eagle Rock facility in Idaho and contribute to rebuilding America’s energy infrastructure so we can produce more CO2-free electricity,” said Jacques Besnainou, CEO of Areva North America. “Areva has considerable experience building and operating enrichment facilities and is putting that experience to work with the Eagle Rock project.”

The news is good for current nuclear industry workers, both on the construction and operation sides, in Idaho. The Idaho Cleanup Project (where I work) is likely to resume workforce reductions as money provided for waste cleanup through the federal stimulus program dries up. Areva’s promised 1,000 construction and operational jobs will help soften the blow there.

Areva’s arrival in eastern Idaho is also significant as it adds another feather in the area’s small but growing alternative energy feathered cap. Hoku Materials, a major manufacturer of silicon solar panels, is building a manufacturing plant at Pocatello. The presence of both companies here could act as an attractor for other similar companies.

The $2 billion loan guarantee is just that -- a guarantee that $2 billion will be loaned to Areva as it builds the $3.3 billion plant. The money isn't a grant -- it'll have to be paid back. The guarantee, however, does make it that much easier for Areva to construct its plant and then sell the enriched uranium to pay back the loans it obtains.

Incentives Included in the American Power Act

The American Power Act, as proposed by Senators Joe Lieberman and John Kerry contains significant incentives for new nuclear plant research and construction that could have a broad impact on the Idaho National Laboratory and could spur construction of new nuclear power plants with the expansion of tax credits and the addition of a grant program that could fund up to 10 percent of a new nuclear power plant’s costs.

The full text of the nearly 1,000-page bill can be found here.

As provided at this location, a summary shows what the bill could do for nuclear power generation:

• We have included a broad package of financial incentives to increase nuclear power generation including regulatory risk insurance for 12 projects, accelerated depreciation for nuclear plants, a new investment tax credit to promote the construction of new generating facilities, $54 billion in loan guarantees and a manufacturing tax credit to spur the domestic production of nuclear parts.
• We improve the efficiency of the licensing process.
• We invest in the research and development of small, modular reactors and enhanced proliferation controls.
• We designate an existing national laboratory as a nuclear waste reprocessing Center of Excellence.

The last bullet is of particular significance for the Idaho National Laboratory, because it’s likely either the INL or Hanford would be designated as the “nuclear waste reprocessing Center of Excellence.” And, given Washington State’s reluctance to see an expanded role for Hanford and Idaho’s continuing support of the INL, politically it makes sense for the INL to receive this designation.

Additionally, the INL currently has a highly-trained workforce already familiar with nuclear waste handling and reprocessing.

Other significant nuclear-related mileposts in the bill include:

A new research initiative meant to explore modular and small-scale reactors (think SL-1 but without the subsequent hijinks), cost-effective manufacturing and construction, licensing and proliferation controls. The last item is highly political but an interesting inclusion, as the proliferation genie already seems to have escaped the bottle.

A requirement that 180 days after the bill is passed, the Department of Energy develop and publish a 5-year strategy to “lower effectively the costs of nuclear reactors, with yearly follow-ups.” Appropriates $50 million a year fro 2011 through 2015 for this plan and research. Again, significance here for the research side of the INL, where similar research efforts are already underway.

Puts in place a 10 percent tax credit for new nuclear plants – 10 percent of qualified power facility construction expenditures. The credit would be received in the year the plant it put into service. To qualify, at least 80 percent of the cost of the plant must be borne by the company building it.

Includes nuclear power facilities in the advanced energy project credit, which has offered credits of up to 30 percent of the costs of building or modifying plants to generate electricity from sun, wind, geothermal and other renewable energy sources. That act established a $2.3 billion pool for the credit, it’s unclear at this time if that amount would be increased or how much has already been spent.

In lieu of the tax credits, the proposed bill would establish a program for grants of up to 10 percent of project costs instead of tax credits. No appropriation limit set, but the bill does say “there is hereby appropriated to the Secretary of the Treasury such sums as may be necessary to carry out this section.”

So there appear to be significant carrots tossed to those engaged in nuclear power research and construction. It’ll be interesting to see how the bill plays out and how it survives the legislative process.

More significantly, it’ll be interesting to see how the nuclear industry can defend inclusion of these items in the bill and to emphasize nuclear’s role in reducing carbon emissions while at the same time addressing the legitimate problem of waste control. That waste reprocessing is included in the bill is significant, as that topic has been off the table politically for more than 30 years. It’s a significant carrot nuclear proponents can use as they stress the renewability of nuclear as a power-generating option.

What’ll be interesting to see is if the reprocessing is left to the government do handle through the Department of Energy – which seems likely as a reprocessing “center of Excellence” is to be designated if the bill is passed – or if private enterprise will be allowed to enter the game. Certainly companies like Areva, which is poised to build a $2 billion uranium processing plant in Eastern Idaho, are supremely placed to engage in reprocessing. The nonproliferation aspect, however, is one that will drive whether reprocessing is kept in government hands or opened to private enterprise, as is the question – albeit unlikely – of terrorist strikes.

Bicycles and Nuclear Power

Saturday, I fixed my ten-year-old’s bicycle. Or so I thought.

His handlebars were giving him difficulty, he said. I tried to understand what was going on. He sometimes has difficulty expressing himself, but through our talks I thought I’d identified the problem. I tightened a few bolts meant to keep the handlebars from rising or falling into the shaft and thought things were good.

Not so.

Yesterday, I fixed them again. This time, I tightened the bolt that keeps the handlebars from being pushed forward as he rides, not the bolt that keeps them at the requisite height.

I fixed the problem. But to fix the problem, I had to make sure I was speaking the same language as he was. To me, “The handlebars fell forward” meant they’d dropped in height. But no, they’d literally drooped forward.

It’s the same thing we’ve got to do when we want to promote nuclear energy. We’ve got to make sure we’re on the same page.

Matthew Wald, writing at the New York Times’ Business of Green blog, puts it this way:

Underlying public attitudes about nuclear power is, if not fear, at least lingering anxiety. This is the industry that gave American English the all-purpose term for disaster, from the financial markets to a toddler’s tantrum: meltdown. The recent deaths of 29 coal miners in West Virginia, of six construction workers at a natural gas plant in Connecticut in February and of five maintenance workers at a hydroelectric plant in Colorado in October 2007 have not shaken the popular conception that it is nuclear power that is dangerous. This seems to be true even as the meltdown at Three Mile Island in 1979, before many Americans living today were born, fades into memory.

“The nuclear industry is just so far removed from people’s lives, they don’t have much feeling for it,” said Baruch Fischhoff, a professor of social and decision sciences at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. “They don’t really trust it. Although it hasn’t done anything recently to lose the general public’s trust, it hasn’t done anything to gain people’s trust.”

Lately, he said, the industry has “fewer enemies, but no friends.”

No friends, you may think. What about me? What about the 62 percent -- an all-time high, Wald says -- of those who support nuclear power? What about President Obama, giving $8 billion in loan guarantees to help build two new nuclear plants in Georgia? Those are friends, right?

Yeah. But when the enemies have symbols like C. Montgomery Burns and Chernobyl to wave in peoples' faces, these kinds of friends aren't enough. It's easy to understand Monty Burns. It's easy to understand Chernobyl. They instantly conjure up images of the evil of nuclear power. We need to find symbols that conjure up the good.

Dan Yurman, writing at Idaho Samizdat, is urging a re-think in how nuclear power advocates present their message. We’ve seen that presenting nuclear as carbon emission-free isn’t winning many advocates among the rank and file who think of nuclear power only in the terms of Three Mile Island and Chernobyl. He suggests a retooling to emphasize energy security and safe plant operation:

I’m not arguing for some huge pro-nuclear public relations push. What I do feel is necessary is a complete re-thinking of how the industry presents its case. The industry’s toughest critics are willing to look at nuclear industry in light of the threat of global warming. Is that enough?

What would their view be if we didn’t have this threat? Where would the industry be today? The benefits of nuclear energy cannot be presented merely as “carbon emission free.”

Maybe some scenario thinking in terms of “what if” might surface some ideas. The issues of energy security and safe operation of plants are closely linked in the public’s mind. I think that’s a starting block for where the rethinking of message points needs to take place.

We have strong evidence that nuclear plants can be operated safely. The US nuclear Navy, for example, has operated nuclear-powered vessels for more than 50 years without a single radiation-related fatality. Nuclear power plants worldwide – with the exception of Chernobyl –have operated without fatalities in that same period of time. Yes, we confront Chernobyl, as a cautionary tale on poor reactor design and personality conflict. Yes, we confront the difficulty of storing the wastes that come from nuclear power production, framing that argument in the same light as how to handle wastes that come from power production from coal and natural gas. Brushing these difficulties and accidents under the rug does little to support our advocacy.

I'm a big advocate on learning how the other guy thinks in order to better understand how to pry into that thinking -- and, yes, you do have to pry -- to insert new ideas, be they the 'truth" of climate change or the possibility that nuclear power could be a good thing. Understanding their nuclear bugaboos can help us understand how to better explain our advocacy in ways that answers the questions they have. This, of course, doesn't work for everyone, because as narrow-minded as some can be on climate change, there are just as many as narrow-minded on nuclear power. But it does help get the bicycle fixed if we know what parts are giving the trouble in the first place.

Global Energy Miracles

The more I hear about and read Bill Gates’ speech at this year’s TED, the more I have to ask – how come we haven’t done this a long time ago?

Lack of money, lack of political will. That’s what it always comes down to.

Critics of nuclear power always bring up two bugaboos – waste and the initial cost of building the power plants – as reasons to avoid the technology altogether. If the technology can be developed to burn depleted uranium in a slow process – Gates is investing in a company researching a fourth-generation nuclear plant capable of doing so – and if there were enough political will in this country to allow nuclear fuel reprocessing, the waste bugaboo, while not disappearing entirely, would be a much simpler task to accomplish. It’s hard to come up with another power source that lets you re-use 99 percent of your fuel and produce electricity for the baseload.

The cost thing has always boggled my mind as well, because it seems to me that there’s a lot of cost involved in putting together large enough solar and wind power plants in order to provide electricity on the mass scale needed to get this country off electricity through coal. Why cost is always brought up as a no against nuclear power but glossed over for other alternative, carbon-friendly power sources kind of bugs me.

I’m as big an advocate for wind and solar as I am nuclear. One of my goals is to have solar or wind power personally installed at the house I live in, in order to help get me off the grid as much as possible. I think these technologies are reliable and inexpensive enough on the small scale like this to help individual families achieve electricity independence.

But we can’t ignore Gates’ (and others’) calls to action for clean electricity on a massive scale:

The world's energy portfolio should not include coal or natural gas, he said, and must include carbon capture and storage technology as well as nuclear, wind and both solar photovoltaics and solar thermal power.

"We're going to have to work on each of these five [areas] and we can't give up on any of them because they look daunting," he said. "They all have significant challenges."

Gates spent a significant portion of his speech highlighting nuclear technology that would turn spent uranium -- the 99 percent of uranium rods that aren't burned in current nuclear power plants -- into electricity.

Just talking about this makes me want to re-read my Richard Rhodes books. There’s a time when the science, the need, and the money all came together. The Manhattan project, the Apollo Missions – we need a similar push for the energy miracles Gates talked about.

Postscript: It's a shame the TED organizers are so slow at releasing text and videos of the speeches for the mass audience -- but then again, maybe they're not tyring to communicate with the masses. Elitist pigs . . .

Update: Just watched President Obama's talk in Maryland, announcing $8 billion in loan guarantees to Southern Co. for their planned nuclear power plant in Georgia. Maybe some of that political will is coming back, along with the cash necessary to make things happen. Encouraging signs. And a reminder that this single plant alone is the equivalent of removing 16 million tons of carbon out of the atmosphere -- compared to building a comparable coal-fired plant.

'Grassroots' Bend With the Wind

Citizens for a Clean Idaho is turning tail.

The Rexburg-based group, opposed to disposal of about 50,000 tons of rock and soil lightly contaminated with radioactivity from Missouri at a state-regulated facility owned by Boise-based American Ecology, has pulled its website in the face of defamation lawsuits filed by the company. You can read about that here, and my blog post about the group and its odd behavior here.

I still have my suspicions about the group. It seems odd to me that they should be so worried about a radioactive waste landfill all the way across the state, yet be willing to ignore the 70-plus-years nuclear legacy at the Idaho National Laboratory (where I work) just on the group's doorstep. Nor do they oppose Areva, Inc's plans to build a $3 billion uranium enrichment facility in Bonneville County, even closer to home.

If you're in the right, you don't shut down your website just because someone's suing you, at least in my opinion. Citizens for a Clean Idaho's organizer, Stephen Loosli, says the website has been pulled on the advice of his attorneys, who plan to countersue the company for infringing on CCI's First Amendment rights.

Aye, there's trouble. Because defamation, if American Ecology can prove it, isn't protected speech under the First Amendment. Thus CCI is being pretty cagey in stripping its site from the web. The Idaho Statesman reports, additionally, that CCI hasn't responded to a federal Nuclear Regulatory Commission report that called into question some of the group's claims about American Ecology's proposed plans.

I salute Citizens for a Clean Idaho's efforts to keep an eye on nuclear waste in the state. There's just enough off about what they're doing, though, to make the situation stink.

Something Odd in Chester

Rocky Barker over at the Idaho Statesman has a provocative article in Thursday's paper in which Boise-based American Ecology questions whether a grassroots group based in Chester, Idaho, is really a front for a rival low-level nuclear waste disposal company, EnergySolutions, based in Salt Lake City. (The Salt Lake Tribune runs a similar story here.) Barker's story is superior, but that's to be expected as he's long written about environmental issues in the state.

Given that there are denials from the group's founder, former Utah developer Steven Loosli -- whose family has long had roots in the Chester area -- and a no-nevermind denial from EnergySolutions, it's clear that the question of grassroots group or shill won't be settled any time soon. And that's just as well. There are enough odd little tics throughout the situation that will keep the speculators speculating, and for good reason.

Of course neither Loosli nor EnergySolutions are going to outright say, yup, American Ecology's got us bang to rights. Both Loosli and EnergySolutions deny any connection between the group and the company. But there's something about Citizens for a Clean Idaho's specificity in how they want to keep Idaho clean that just seems a little odd.

Basically put, Citizens for a Clean Idaho doesn't like that Westinghouse is considering moving low-level nuclear waste -- mostly slightly contaminated soil -- from a Missouri reactor site to the Idaho landfill near Grand View (near Mountain Home). They claim that since American Ecology's site isn't licensed with the Nuclear Regulatory Committee, that the waste shouldn't be shipped to Idaho.

That's fine in and of itself. But what seems odd is that to stretch from Chester to Grand View, Citizens for a Clean Idaho have to leap over the Idaho National Laboratory, home of the United States' nuclear navy, its nuclear energy research lab, and a high-level nuclear waste respository that's currently being cleaned up. The group also apparently has no quibble with French company Areva's plans to build a $3 billion uranium processing facility west of Idaho Falls, producing a lot more waste that Westinghouse wants to send to Grand View.

The group says on its website that they don't oppose the nuclear industry:

We believe that a strong, regulated nuclear industry in the U.S. (and Idaho) provides competitive, security, and economic benefits to the country. We do believe, though, that the regulations and guidelines imposed by the NRC need to be followed to the letter to ensure the public health, safety, and welfare of American citizens.

Barker gets some interesting comments from the Snake River Alliance, a group which has long been a nuclear watchdog in the state. They, too, think Citizens for a Clean Idaho's concentration on the Grand View site, while overlooking the INL and Areva's pending arrival, is odd. Now, if this group wants to concentrate on Grand View and Grand View only, that's fine. It just sounds odd to me, that's all.